Excerpt: In the Education Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, we’re always working to bring exciting scientific content to K-12 classrooms. Educators can access many of these free resources, classroom materials and activities online, and we’re adding more all the time. The inspiration for these products often comes from the work being done at JPL…

Excerpt: Darcy Reynard hates “beg buttons” so much, he created an online map and recruited Twitter users to use a stop-watch on pedestrian crossing signals across the city. The map was soon reporting waits of more than three minutes as pedestrians or cyclists shivered in the cold, missed their bus or gave up and jaywalked….

Editor’s Choice: This paper points out that there is an oft-overlooked category of people interacting with citizen science projects – people who do not contribute to the data collection, but who nonetheless consume data and information related to the project. The questions are then posed – do these data consumers share the same characteristics as…

Abstract: Information on species’ distributions and abundances, environmental associations, and how these change over time are central to the study and conservation of wildlife populations. This information is challenging to obtain at relevant scales across range-wide extents for two main reasons. First, local and regional processes that affect populations vary throughout the year and across…

Abstract: In an uncertain future of climate change and constrained resources, urban agriculture is widely viewed as a sustainable and scalable approach to improving food security. While its social, health and wellbeing benefits are well documented, there is a major knowledge gap in terms of the financial accessibility of urban food production for all households….

Abstract: The continuity of long-term environmental datasets provided by citizen science groups has the potential to address the specific concerns of multiple audiences. We designed an analysis framework based on a 16-year dataset across 40 sites in Puget Sound, WA, USA, which citizen scientists collected by visiting beaches annually and using prescribed protocols to record…

Excerpt: Some 95% of the ocean is completely unexplored, unseen by human eyes. That naturally means that there are many marine environments that we don’t know much about, but that we’re still putting at risk from damaging activities such as bottom trawling. Meadows of seagrass – flowering plants that live in shallow, sheltered areas –…

Editor’s Choice: Peering into the pits of rotted stumps, poring over craggy tree bark, and most importantly, pausing. Patient and still, awaiting subtle movements that betray the presence of tiny, cryptic, eight-legged predators. A mantra in the nature museum field is “connect with nature,” an aspiration conjuring up images of vast landscapes or charismatic megafauna….

Excerpt: Sleepy sea otters piling onto pads of pickleweed in Elkhorn Slough are causing quite a stir. A partnership between local researchers and dedicated citizen scientists is researching Elkhorn Slough’s rebounding sea otter populations and the strange behavior that might have brought them there. The results of this years-long study, published in the journal Ecology,…

Excerpt: FIU deployed more than 100 citizen scientists to investigate whether flooding from the most recent King Tide in October was bringing saltwater or freshwater inland to urban areas. The findings could provide critical clues as to why such unusual flooding is occurring in South Florida, what areas are most at-risk and whether the frequency…